


i'm coming for everyone

by unimate



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:21:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22600921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unimate/pseuds/unimate
Summary: The smoker leans back against his door and surveys you both, narrow shoulders rising as he laughs at one of Harry’s jokes. Some patently bizarre observation that is nevertheless surprisingly astute and irresistibly funny. Usually he saves his quips for you.Usually. How long does it take something to become usual? You’ve only known each other for a few days.(Kim is jealous of the smoker on the balcony.)
Relationships: Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi, Kim Kitsuragi/Smoker on the Balcony
Comments: 20
Kudos: 251





	i'm coming for everyone

As soon as the smoker on the balcony smiles down at your partner, you smell trouble. When he takes a lazy drag and flexes his fingers toward the key beneath the rock, warning tingles at the base of your spine. 

When Du Bois starts flirting with him outside his door, at first you think he’s making fun of him. Then you think he’s making fun of you. But then you watch him more closely; how he leans forward, the flush across the bridge of his nose and the blown pupils. He’s sober, miraculously. You’ve been with him all day. Unless he’s been doing lines in the bathroom, what you’re witnessing isn’t intoxication, it’s arousal.

The smoker leans back against his door and surveys you both, narrow shoulders rising as he laughs at one of Harry’s jokes. Some patently bizarre observation that is nevertheless surprisingly astute and irresistibly funny. Usually he saves his quips for you. 

Usually. How long does it take something to become usual? You’ve only known each other for a few days. 

It shouldn’t bother you. Few things do. 

Here’s a brief list of the things that bother you: 

\--a disorganized workspace  
\--freezing rain  
\--people eating in your car  
\--the construction that has been going on at the end of your street for the last year and a half

And very rarely, on special occasions: 

-your thinning hair

The people who mangle your name on the phone, the 12 years you spent getting passed over for the promotion to detective due to ‘budgeting reasons’ or some similar nonsense--you don’t allow those things to bother you. There would be no point except to broaden the pit of bitterness inside year after year. 

Harry’s gaze catching on the smoker’s pale, slender hands, unlined face, and clear blue eyes. You don’t let that bother you either. 

You thought he was faking it when you met. Another deadbeat cop who thought he was too good for a place like Martinaise, using the assignment to carouse and rack up his expense account, pretending not to remember any of it in order to avoid what will surely only amount to a slap on the wrist back at his precinct. But he would have broken character eventually. Something would have shown through, some flicker of recognition. At the very least he would have gotten bored of listening to you explain the most basic facts of the world. He didn’t know what the RCM was. What Revachol was. If he just wanted to avoid responsibility, he could have pretended to have forgotten the last few days. That was infinitely more believable than total fucking amnesia. 

As far as you know that doesn’t actually exist outside science fiction. 

You outline a plan in your journal within your first half hour of acquaintance.

1\. Solve this murder quickly

2\. Speak to this drunk as little as you possibly can

3\. Leave

But the plan gets blurrier as the case grows more and more complicated, and as you watch this nameless, unshaven brute with the most disco-ass shoes you’ve ever seen in your life successfully talk his way past an ethno-supremacist, tell a racist lorry driver to go fuck himself, and convince a lonely, expletive-spewing child to open up about his abusive father. He promises a lonely woman in a wheelchair that he will track down her missing husband, and coaxes a 150 réal donation from a rich lady in a boat. He breaks down into desperate tears in front of a union leader over his missing gun, and you are absolutely certain he’s having involved conversations with inanimate objects. He’s been high as a kite for about 85% of all of this.

He’s got an intensely heterosexual vibe, not to mention a tendency to pick clothes up out of trash barrels, but what the fuck does that even mean in the grand scheme of things? You’ve made it with some extremely straight men, many of whom would have continued to insist they were straight all the way up to their dicks ending up in your mouth. That’s nothing new.

The point is, you shouldn’t give a fuck who or what Harry Du Bois is making eyes at.

But then you stand in the rain over a bloated corpse, watching as your partner gets down on his knees and pushes his fingers into the open grey matter of a head wound, squishing through fat and brains, rooting around with a look of religious concentration. You kneel beside him to help, pushing from the other end, your fingers meeting through decaying flesh. The two harpy children shout, the rain soaks your hair to the back of your neck, and a hard pulse of arousal hits you deep in the gut. 

It’s not the worst thing that’s ever turned you on, but it’s close. 

Harry looks across the dead man at you and he smiles. 

But now he’s smiling at the man on the balcony, and you hate it. You hate that you hate it. It makes you feel petty and young. It’s why you send him on his way when he asks to spend the night in your hotel room. Well, that and the fact he’d spent 16 réal on beer today.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he says. 

“You have a free room in the fishing village.” 

“That’s a mile away! And it’s about to snow.” 

“Then I suppose you should get started.” 

He’s wrong--it isn’t cold enough to snow. All you get is a miserable drizzle that coats everything it touches in a shiny film, blurring lights and slicking cobblestones. You stand under the eaves of the roof and light a cigarette, staring off into the dark void of the back lot. From this distance you think you can make out the skeleton outline of the hanging tree. You think you see movement--quick, then gone. Is it that horrible ginger child, or something worse? 

Harry stood here with you on the first night, staring out into the same square. He’d had even less of an idea who he was then; he didn’t even know his name. It was raining then, too, water dripping off the brim of his hat as he watched you light up. You’re so cool, Kim. How are you so cool? The earnestness caught you off guard. You weren’t expecting it. 

You keep not expecting him. You think he’ll go for your throat, but he just watches you with those eyes like bruises. And today he’d watched the smoker on the balcony with eyes lit up and dancing. 

It doesn’t matter what he thinks, you tell yourself. You’ll solve this case, you’ll resolve the union dispute, and then you’ll go home. You’ll never have to see Harry Du Bois again. 

Even as you think it you know it isn’t true. The air around you thrums, whispering to you that you aren’t getting away from this one so easily. Whatever uneasy web spins around this man has got you well in its grasp. 

You breathe smoke in and you breathe smoke out. The rain gets heavier. Harry should be in the village by now, standing dripping in the little shack, old coat soaked to the lining. 

You pull in one last drag, the end flaring orange before you crush it till it’s dead. The crumpled pack is almost empty. You’ll have to make a stop at the drugstore with the stupid name. 

Almost like your hand is being guided by someone else, you pull out the remaining cigarette and hold it between your fingers. Your bloodstream is buzzing with nicotine, a quick, pulsing pleasure. You think of bloodshot eyes and hot breath on the back of your neck as you stood sheltered from the rain beneath the canopy of a bookstore, right after watching him give a mailbox an encouraging little pat. Good letter box. You’re doing a great job. 

“ _Bounsoir_ , officer. Do you need a light?” 

You startle, sending both pack and cigarette tumbling over the edge of the railing and into the dark below. “Shit!” 

The smoker from the balcony watches it go. Well, you suppose now he’s the smoker from the Whirling’s common room. “Oh. Bad luck. Have one of mine. Different brand, I’m afraid.” The cafe lights glint off his straight, white teeth. 

“No, thank you.” You add, thoughtlessly, “I shouldn’t.” 

The man laughs, a bright, guileless sound that penetrates like a bell into the drizzly night. His voice is so clear for a smoker. “Okay, officer.” 

He lights his own cigarette. He’d been smoking all day, though, downstairs. Which means he’d come out here for you. That knowledge climbs up your spine in slow, kinetic furls. 

“Was there something you needed, Monsieur?” 

Blue smoke in the black evening. “I saw your friend leave. Did the two of you have a fight?” 

You’ve finished your cigarette. There’s no reason for you to stay out in the cold. The bitterness bubbling in the center of you pulses hot when you look at him. You don’t want to be one of those old men who regret the youth they frittered away. This pretty boy with his smooth skin and indulgent, knowing smile shouldn’t fill you with this formless mass of jaded self-hatred, and yet--

“Just a brief disagreement between colleagues,” you tell him, though you shouldn’t tell him anything. But the tide is pushing at you harder than it usually does. It’s this Martinaise weather. It’s the coast. The usual steady river inside you is blown to a froth. 

“He’s strange, isn’t he?” The smoker ashes off the balcony. “I don’t know anybody who talks the way he does.” 

“Well, the two of you certainly seemed to get along.” 

Another laugh. “I get along with everyone.” 

“He’s a bit old for you, isn’t he?” 

“Who are we talking about?” His mouth curls up at the corner. “Me or you?” 

You adjust your glasses. “I’m not going to play games with you, Monsieur.” 

“Who’s playing games? I’m gossiping.” 

“Surely both of us could do better.” It’s nasty, but you’re feeling nasty. And Harry isn’t here. 

“Ha! Surely. But I respect hedonism. I find it irresistible, actually.” 

You don’t appreciate being poked at by a boy twenty years younger than you. “I can’t figure out your angle.” 

“Just a student of the human condition, same as you.” He has feral eyes. Fox’s eyes. “That, and I’m hitting on you.” 

You grip the balcony railing, pulse in your fingertips. “I thought you preferred hedonism.” 

“Prefer, sure.” He leans in close. “But I think you have some hedonism in you, _gendarme_. Buried deep down.” 

He takes a hard pull on his cigarette. Cool fingers brush your jaw, gentle, then rough as he grips your chin and tips your head back. His mouth tastes like unfiltered menthols and he breathes in a warm mouthful of smoke, licking in after it, kissing you until your lungs burn. 

When he releases you, you stay there with your head tipped back, looking up toward the stars that you know should be swimming in cloud cover, but instead paint a perfect galaxy across the velvet sky. The city hums inside you, and across the mile between you, you feel Harry alone by the sea, his skin hot, his heart pumping sluggish, foaming blood. 

Are hallucinations catching? Is the entire population of Martinaise infected? Or is it something stranger, some cosmic pressure pouring down on all of you, your partner just a harbinger of a stranger and more terrifying world? 

Or maybe this kid’s cigarette is just laced with something.

“Have a good night, _gendarme_.” He drops the butt in the ashtray. “My door is always open, if you need a friend.” 

“A Sunday friend?” 

“Oh, _gendarme_.” Another fox’s smile. “You are at least a Friday.” 

He leaves you on the balcony. You watch until he comes out the front door down below, then watch his slow progress across the square, the flare of orange as he pauses to light another cigarette. He doesn’t look back. 

You breathe in the wet air. Shivers settle deep beneath your skin. From across the river, Harry shivers with you. 

Tomorrow, then.


End file.
